The Loner: Crossfire

by J. A. Johnstone

  Smashing his right fist into the man’s face he drove the back of the man’s head into the mud. The man heaved and bucked but Conrad twisted his wrist so hard that bones ground together. The man howled in pain and dropped the gun.

  Conrad grabbed the man’s coat, rolling over in the muck as they struggled. He twisted his body aside just in time to take the vicious blow aimed at his groin on his thigh instead. His leg went numb for a moment, but at least it didn’t incapacitate him as it would have had it found its intended target.

  As they fought the gunman managed to lock his hands around Conrad’s throat. Conrad looked up past the man’s furious face and saw the lawman leaning out the window on the second floor. The star packer was yelling, but Conrad couldn’t make out the words over the roaring of his blood in his head as the bushwhacker tried to choke the life out of him.

  Cupping his hands, he slapped them over the man’s ears as hard as he could, assaulting the eardrums. The man yelped in pain and loosened his grip. Conrad broke it and flung him off. The man rolled across the muddy alley and came to a stop against the wall of the hardware store.

  Conrad scrambled after him. The man jerked a leg up and tried to kick Conrad in the stomach, but Conrad grabbed his foot and twisted it. The man yelled and was forced to roll over onto his belly to keep Conrad from breaking his leg.

  Conrad let go of the leg and dropped on top of the man, landing hard with both knees in the small of his back. He grabbed the man’s hair and slammed his face into the ground twice. That was finally enough to knock the fight out of the man. He stopped struggling and lay there gasping.

  “By God, stop attackin’ that fella or I’ll shoot!”

  Conrad looked up at the lawman, who had his shotgun pointed at the two men in the alley. Conrad was a little out of breath. “Be careful ... with that Greener, Marshal. If it goes off ... you’ll kill both of us down here.”

  “Stand up and move away from that man, you damn loco weed!” the badge-toter ordered. “You’re under arrest for attempted murder, assault and battery, unlawfully dischargin’ a firearm, trespassin’, and anything else I can think of !”

  Conrad gestured toward the semiconscious man at his feet. “Blast it, he’s the one who tried to kill me! Him and his partner I wounded out on the street.”

  “So you’re the one who shot that hombre! I might a’ knowed it. Take your gun out and drop it.”

  Conrad snorted in disgust. “Not hardly. It’s nearly brand-new. I’m not going to drop it in the mud.”

  The lawman sputtered angrily for a moment, then said, “Stay right there! Don’t you move, you hear me?”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Conrad said.

  Not until he found out for sure who had tried to have him killed.

  Chapter 3

  By the time the burly lawman got down the stairs in the saloon and reached the alley, three more men wearing badges and carrying shotguns had run up. They were standing next to Conrad. The first lawman waved his Greener and ordered, “Disarm that man and take him into custody!”

  “Settle down, Hargity,” the other deputy said. “This is Conrad Browning. We’re not going to arrest him.”

  Hargity scowled. “Who?”

  “He used to live here. In fact, he was one of Carson City’s leading citizens. Owns railroads, mines, banks, ships, you name it. Friend of the governor.”

  “That don’t matter,” Hargity snapped. “He shot a man on the street, raised hell in that saloon, and assaulted this fella. I say he’s under arrest!”

  “If you’d bothered to question any witnesses,” said the lawman who had introduced himself to Conrad as Deputy Wallace, “you’d know this man and the one Mr. Browning shot tried to kill him right in front of the hospital. That’s the first thing Stevens and I determined when we got here. Mr. Browning fired his gun in self-defense, and he was trying to apprehend the second gunman.” Wallace nudged the bushwhacker, who lay on the muddy floor of the alley. “Looks like he succeeded.”

  “But ... but ...” Hargity sputtered.

  “No offense, but I’m chief deputy,” Wallace said. “You and Stevens take this man and lock him up.”

  “I’m going to want to ask him some questions later,” Conrad said.

  Wallace nodded. “That’s fine, as long as Marshal Owens goes along with it. Right now I want to go see how that man you wounded is doing. Are you coming along?”

  “Yes, I am,” Conrad said. “He may be able to tell me what I want to know.”

  “Who paid the two of them to ambush you?”

  Conrad nodded. “That’s right. I’ve got a pretty good idea, but I’d like for it to be confirmed.”

  The slender, solemn-faced Wallace motioned for Conrad to follow him and left the alley, heading across the street to the hospital. The lobby was in an uproar, not surprising since there had been a gun battle right outside. Dr. Liam Taggart was talking to several men, some in white coats, the rest in business suits.

  Taggart spotted Conrad approaching with Deputy Wallace and came across the lobby to greet them. “Are you all right, Mr. Browning? The rumor is that you were the target of an assassination attempt.”

  “That’s true, but I’m fine,” Conrad said. He looked down at his mud-splattered clothes. “Nothing hurt but my dignity and my wardrobe.”

  “I’ll have a nurse tell Mr. Vincenzo right away that you’re all right. He was quite worried when he heard the shots. He seemed to think it was a foregone conclusion you were involved in the trouble, whatever it was.”

  Conrad smiled. “Arturo knows me pretty well.”

  Taggart crooked a finger at a nurse and gave her the message to deliver to Arturo, then Conrad asked the doctor, “What about the wounded man? I assume he was brought in here.”

  Taggart nodded. “Yes, he’s in surgery at the moment to repair his shoulder. You shot him?”

  “Seemed like the thing to do at the time,” Conrad said.

  “Your bullet did an extensive amount of damage. I doubt he’ll ever be able to use his left arm properly again.”

  “Then maybe he won’t try to bushwhack anybody else,” Wallace said. “We’re going to want to talk to him.”

  “You’ll have to wait a good long time. It’ll take a while for the ether to wear off.”

  Wallace shrugged. “We have another prisoner we can question, I suppose. In the meantime, I’m going to assign a deputy to guard this one. There’ll be somebody outside the man’s room all the time until he’s healthy enough for us to take him to jail.”

  “That’s fine, Deputy, as long as it doesn’t interfere with anything of a medical nature we have to do.”

  “There’s something else, Doctor,” Conrad said. “During the shooting, I heard someone cry out when one of the shots missed me. Was somebody hit by a stray bullet?”

  “As a matter of fact, that’s right,” Taggart said. “A young woman was struck.”

  Conrad frowned worriedly. “Was she badly hurt?”

  “Scared out of her wits more than anything else. The bullet barely nicked her hip before smashing into a lamppost. She’ll be sore and limp for a week or so, but she’ll be fine. We have her in a ward right now, mostly because she’s bordering on hysteria. She’s so upset about being shot.”

  “Send all her bills to Claudius Turnbuckle. He’ll see to it they’re taken care of.”

  “That’s pretty generous of you, considering the young lady’s injury was an accident.”

  “The only accident was that she got hit instead of me,” Conrad said. “I’m getting mighty tired of things like that happening.”

  The prisoner was a lantern-jawed man with a drooping black mustache. His gray tweed suit was covered with drying mud stains. Conrad hadn’t noticed those details during the brief shoot-out and the fight that followed. He had been too busy trying to stay alive.

  “His name’s Ed Gillespie,” Chief Deputy Wallace told Conrad as they stood outside the cell. “We didn’t have any trouble identifying him. He’s
a cheap holdup artist and gunman. Been in and out of jail for years, but we’ve never been able to convict him of murder and send him to the gallows, even though we’re pretty sure he’s killed several people. The man you shot is probably Walt Farley. He and Gillespie have been mixed up in plenty of shady deals together.”

  Gillespie sat on the bunk inside the cell not saying anything. He kept his eyes turned toward the floor and didn’t acknowledge that Conrad and Wallace were there. His jaw was swollen and sported several bruises from Conrad’s fist.

  Wallace grasped one of the bars in the cell door. “Gillespie, you can make it easier on yourself if you’ll answer a few questions.”

  Gillespie didn’t look up. It was like he hadn’t heard Wallace and didn’t know the deputy was there.

  “Come on,” Wallace said. “You’re going to prison no matter what you do, but you know we can make it a lot rougher on you if we want to. You and Farley didn’t go after Mr. Browning and try to kill him in broad daylight on some whim. You’d only do a thing like that if you were being paid to. I want to know who you’re working for.”

  Gillespie continued staring at the floor.

  Wallace looked at the prisoner for a moment, then sighed and shook his head. “Sorry,” he muttered as he turned to Conrad. “We can work him over until he talks, but it may take a while.”

  Conrad looked along the section of cell block in the city jail. The other cells were empty. “Or you can step outside for a few minutes and let me talk to him.” He rested his hand on the butt of the Colt at his hip.

  “Now wait a minute.” Wallace held up his hands. “You can’t just—”

  “Why not?” Conrad broke in. “You said yourself he’s a killer who’s gotten away with murdering people in the past. Anything that happened to him now would be a fitting punishment, don’t you think?”

  For the first time Gillespie’s eyes flicked up, then back down. He had heard what Conrad said and knew what he meant.

  “Marshal Owens would never forgive me if he found out I let you get at a prisoner,” Wallace said. “It’d mean my job, Mr. Browning. I’m sorry.”

  “What do you make in a year, Deputy?”

  Wallace frowned and named a figure.

  “I can pay you twice that and never even know the money is gone. You can probably find another job in two year’s time, don’t you think?”

  Wallace rubbed his jaw and appeared to be pondering the idea. “I’m sure I could,” he muttered. “If things got too loud back here, though, I might have to spread around a little more cash to keep it quiet.”

  “Whatever it costs.” Conrad’s voice was as cold as the snow that capped the mountain peaks outside Carson City. “The money doesn’t matter.”

  Gillespie swallowed hard. “Wait a minute. Deputy, you can’t let this—this—”

  “You hear something, Mr. Browning?” Wallace asked. “It’s funny, I was talking a minute ago and nobody seemed to hear me. Now I’m not sure I can hear anything.”

  Gillespie came up off the bunk and grasped the bars. “Wait, damn it! I’ll tell you what you want to know. Just don’t let this loco varmint anywhere near me!”

  Wallace leaned his head to the side, indicating Conrad should back away from the bars. Conrad cooperated as Wallace glared through the bars and asked, “Who paid you to kill Mr. Browning here?”

  A cunning look appeared on Gillespie’s battered face. “First you gotta tell me ... is Walt all right?”

  “You’re concerned about your friend.” Wallace sneered. “How touching. Yeah, he’s in the hospital. They fixed his busted shoulder. He’ll be laid up for a while ... and then he’ll be in prison. Maybe the judge’ll put the two of you in the same cell. That sound good to you?”

  “Shut your nasty mouth,” Gillespie snapped. “Walt’s a good hombre. Always been square with me. That’s all. As for who paid us to go after this fella, you go talk to Carl Monroe. That’s all I got to say.”

  Wallace jerked his head in a nod. “I reckon that’ll do, for now.”

  “You ... you wouldn’t have really turned that lunatic loose on me, would you, Deputy?”

  Wallace’s answering smile was wolfish. “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  Once they were outside the cell block, Conrad asked, “Who’s Carl Monroe?”

  Wallace grunted. “Lawyer. Crooked lawyer. I wasn’t surprised to hear Gillespie mention his name. Gillespie and Farley have been tied in with Monroe before. Don’t you remember Monroe from when you lived here before? His name turned up in the paper quite a bit, any time there was some big swindle or scandal.”

  “I was busy with other things,” Conrad said.

  Like running a business and being married to a beautiful, wonderful woman, he thought. He hadn’t spared any attention for petty crooks.

  “We’ll haul Monroe in and talk to him, but I don’t know how much we can get out of him,” Wallace said. “He’s got a reputation for being pretty tight-lipped. I’m not sure a little act like the one you put on for Gillespie would work on a hardboiled character like Monroe.”

  “Act?” Conrad repeated with a faint smile.

  He left Wallace standing outside the cell block as the deputy watched with a worried frown on his face.

  Chapter 4

  Conrad went straight to his hotel, where the desk clerk handed him a city directory. It took only a moment to look up the address of Carl Monroe’s office. Wallace had said the authorities would question Monroe, but Conrad wanted to get to him first.

  The clerk gave him directions to the address. The building was only about four blocks away. Monroe’s office was on the second floor, above a bank. The building had one of those newfangled elevators, but Conrad took the stairs.

  Gilt letters on the pebbled glass upper half of a door in the hallway read CARL MONROE, ATTORNEY AT LAW. Conrad didn’t knock. He grasped the knob with his left hand while his right hovered near the butt of his Colt. He didn’t expect to walk into another ambush in the lawyer’s office, but it didn’t pay to take too many chances. He turned the knob and shoved the door open.

  An attractive woman with blond hair swept into an elaborate pile of curls on top of her head looked up from a typewriter on her desk. “Yes? May I help you?”

  He glanced around the room. It was a typical outer office, with the desk, a coat rack and hat tree, and a couple filing cabinets. A portrait of President McKinley hung on the wall, looking down in solemn dignity. For all that, the rug on the floor was a little threadbare, and the walls could have used a fresh coat of paint.

  “I need to see Mr. Monroe,” Conrad said.

  “I’m not aware of any appointments he has at this time,” the blonde said. “Is this concerning a legal matter?” She looked at him a little dubiously, probably because he hadn’t taken the time to change his clothes and still wore the mud-stained suit.

  Conrad nodded. “You could say that. It involves a couple associates of his named Gillespie and Farley.”

  The blonde frowned and shook her head. “I’m not familiar with those names.” Even as she spoke, Conrad saw her shift slightly in her chair, and his keen ears picked up the faint sound of a buzzer from behind the door leading to Monroe’s private office. He knew the woman had used her foot to press an alarm button. Monroe probably had another way out of his office.

  Conrad didn’t wait. He moved past the blonde’s desk in a hurry. She leaped up from her chair and tried to grab his coat. “You can’t—”, but she was too late. He was already ramming his shoulder against the door of Monroe’s office. It slammed open, and he saw movement from the corner of his eye. A bulky figure was halfway through another door, on his way out.

  Conrad drew his Colt and eared back the hammer, even though that wasn’t necessary since the revolver was a double-action model. He figured the sound of the gun being cocked might be enough to stop the fleeing figure in his tracks.

  It worked. The man froze in the doorway. “Don’t shoot!”

  “Turn around,” Conra
d told him. “Slowly.”

  The man did as he was ordered. He was short, heavyset, had a florid face, and hair that looked like it had been slicked down with black shoe polish. His suit, like his offices, appeared to be of good quality at first glance, but another look revealed its worn, shabby nature.

  “I don’t know who you are, friend, but you don’t have to bust in here with a gun,” Monroe said. “I’m always glad to talk to anyone, especially a potential client.”

  “I’m not a client. I’m Conrad Browning.”

  The look of alarm that flashed in Monroe’s eyes told Conrad the lawyer recognized his name. Monroe controlled the reaction quickly, and said, “If you’ll put that gun away, Mr. Browning, I’ll be happy to discuss whatever it is that’s bothering you.”

  “What’s bothering me is that you paid Ed Gillespie and Walt Farley to kill me.”

  “My God!” Monroe exclaimed. “I never did such a thing! I don’t even know who you’re talking about.”

  Conrad went on as if Monroe hadn’t said anything. “What I want to know now is who paid you to hire them. Tell me that and our business is done.”

  “It’s impossible. I can’t tell you something I don’t know anything about!”

  “Mr. Monroe?” the blond secretary said from behind Conrad. “Do you want me to summon the authorities?”

  Monroe’s eyes flicked toward her over Conrad’s shoulder. “No, no, I’m sure that’s not necessary—”

  Something in Monroe’s expression warned Conrad. He turned around in time to see the blonde had picked up the freestanding hat tree and was swinging it at his head. He twisted quickly, and the base crashed against his shoulder instead of his skull.

  The impact was enough to make him stagger and drop his gun. The blonde drew the hat tree back and tried to ram it into his belly. Conrad caught hold of it and wrenched it out of her hands as he heard the rapid slap of shoe leather behind him. A glance over his shoulder told him Monroe was running again.